Subscribe to Email Updates

When Dr. Edward Blocker tells the story of reeling in “the big one,” it sounds like a whopper of a fish tale—until you see the 320-pound yellowfin tuna mounted on the wall of his home. “It took me three hours to get it in,” Blocker says of the offshore fishing feat. “I knew I had a trophy when we finally got it beside the boat. It was huge.”

Equally impressive is the head of a 300-pound pig hanging in his office. He shot the wild boar after it charged him and his teenage son one day when they were hunting in Estill.

“He looked right at us, and I could see the venom in his eyes,” Blocker says. “He made this wild, guttural sound and then ran at us. It was kind of scary.”

An avid outdoorsman, Blocker spends much of his leisure time in the woods or on the water hunting and fishing for food to fill his three freezers, affectionately referred to as “Blocker’s Meat Market” by his wife, Tami.

“The cardinal rule is that you only hunt what you can eat,” says the father of three. “To feed my family for a year, it takes a combination of four or five deer and pigs.” He supplements the family's stock of wild game with a variety of fish, including spottail bass, flounder and trout.

Blocker, who grew up in Charleston, has always enjoyed the Southern hunting tradition. He belongs to the 24,000-acre Groton Plantation Hunt Club and is co-owner of a fish camp on a spit island near Fripp. “At the cabin, it’s all about fishing and cooking,” Blocker says. “We’ve made some pretty inventive things with fish, crab, shrimp and mussels.”